Trump Is Building His Own Paramilitary Force

You know those optical illusions where you look at a picture and depending on where and how your eyes focus, maybe you're looking at a vase, maybe you're looking at two faces. It kinda keeps flickering back and forth. Looking at the Trump administration is like that for me. Though the flickering is between this is democracy. The American people are getting what they voted for good and hard. Or this is authoritarianism, at least the road to authoritarianism. I can see the picture of a president doing what he was elected to do. Donald Trump ran unquestionably on mass deportations. He ran on reversing a historic surge of migration into this country. He won on that platform. He is just doing what he promised. He's tripling ICE's budget. He's funneling tens of billions of dollars to build detention centers. In LA, protesters tried to obstruct him, so Trump called up the National Guard. And after years of railing about crime levels in our major cities, Trump is using the power he has over Washington DC to do something about it, to show Americans that he's doing something about it. I don't like any of this. I certainly didn't vote for it. But Trump promised, and Americans did vote for, the biggest deportation operation in US history. It was always going to be ugly and cruel. So I can see that picture. And then it flickers. My eyes refocus. I see the evisceration of due process. I see them building detention centers where it is extraordinarily hard for lawyers and families to reach the people in them. I see men in masks refusing to ID themselves and pulling people into vans. I see armed US troops in camo, some on horseback, riding through MacArthur Park in Los Angeles like they're an occupying army. I see Trump sending in armed forces to take over the American capital. What is going to happen when predictably a protester throws a rock at an agent or a marine hears a car backfiring and thinks they heard a gunshot? In an instant, this could all explode. You could have American troops firing on American civilians in an American city and a country defining crisis. And then what? What happens then? Because that's the other picture I see, the one that keeps coming into clear focus. Not Trump cleaning up crisis or disorder, but Trump creating crisis and disorder so he can build what he has wanted to build, an authoritarian state, a military or a paramilitary that answers only to him, that puts him in total control. And I wonder, are these pictures even different? Trump promised all of this. You can destroy democracy somewhat democratically. Radley Balko is a journalist who's written about policing and criminal justice for decades. He's the author of Rise of the Warrior Cop, the militarization of America's police forces, and he writes the terrific substack, The Watch, where he's been tracking the militarization and the escalation of all this …